The Newt Gingrich phenomenon is almost as delightfully bizarre as the Tim Tebow phenomenon.

That isn’t to say there aren’t important differences. For one, Gingrich has made a career of being a lying, adultering, money-chasing historian/non-lobbyist who wants to be president, whereas Tebow is a nice guy who plays quarterback.

Also, Gingrich’s stratospheric rise can be rationally explained.

Gingrich is, of course, the latest not-Romney in the Republican race. Everyone gets a turn, apparently, except Ron Paul. But Gingrich is different from the other not-Romneys. He’s also the not-Bachmann, the not-Perry, the not-Cain and represents the wing of his party that doesn’t believe being intellectual necessarily makes you un-American.

Here’s how desperate conservatives are for a not-Romney, Gingrich, who burned out sometime in the late-’90s, is leading in polls despite having said — and hold on to your seats here — something semi-reasonable on illegal immigration.

That became headline news because to be a Republican moderate these days on immigration means you don’t want to turn the entire country into Alabama.

Gingrich said only what everyone knows — that we’re not going to round up 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them. Therefore, there needs to be a path toward legalizing those with real roots here.

This is not the Bush/Obama call for a “path to citizenship.” Gingrich doesn’t want to go that far down the road. He just wants to do the pro-family thing and turn some “illegal” immigrants into “legal” immigrants, thus keeping families together. Gingrich knows too well about breaking families apart, after all.

And so, Gingrich boldly called for a “humane” immigration policy and said it wasn’t “amnesty.” But if I’ve read my Tom Tancredo right, you can’t even use the word “humane” on this topic unless you are, in fact, advocating “amnesty.”

It’s not a real plan, but it’s bold in this environment. You saw what happened to Rick Perry when he reasonably supported a Texas version of the DREAM Act. It doomed his campaign. Perry went so far as to say if you didn’t like the Texas version of the DREAM Act, you didn’t have a heart. Humane, anyone?

A storm has followed. Some liberals are now saying nice things about him, which can’t help him in a Republican race. Romney and others have blasted him, of course, but Romney’s spokesman couldn’t answer the simple question of what his candidate would do with the 11 million, other than to say he wouldn’t do “amnesty.”

Unfortunately for Romney, Bloomberg News found a 2006 interview with Romney, in which he said, very Gingrich-like, that illegal immigrants “are not going to be rounded up and box-carried out” and those law-abiders among them should “get in line” for the citizenship process.

For Romney, it’s another change of, I guess, heart. And now Gingrich is starting to pile on, saying, “I wouldn’t lie to the American people. I wouldn’t switch my position for political reason.”

The thing about Gingrich is that if he talks long enough, he’ll usually say something reasonable. He’ll also say about three unreasonable things in the same time frame, but that’s Gingrich, who often has conflicting views on the same topic and is never at a loss for words. Why should he be?

According to Gingrich’s calculation, Freddie Mac paid him about $25,000 monthly for an hour’s consultation. I don’t know what that is per word, but it obviously adds up to a million-dollar account at Tiffany’s. You’d be talking, too.

Only a couple of days before, though, when Gingrich was talking at Harvard (yeah, that Harvard), he was making the case against “truly stupid” child labor laws that prevent poor students from becoming school janitors so they could presumably mop up after more privileged peers.

Newt is certifiably Newt, which is why he’ll never win. Politico did a recent piece asking a number of conservative intellectuals if they thought Gingrich was a true intellectual. Unsurprisingly, most said no. George Will goes further, saying he’s the “classic rental politician” who “embodies almost everything disagreeable about modern Washington.”

But, according to the latest polls, he’s still ahead of Romney. And he’s still mostly right on immigration.

There’s been way more than enough written about Donald Trump’s battle with kneeling football players — especially with a major crisis underway in Puerto Rico — but one thing really does bother me that’s been revealed during this brouhaha: the extent to which many Americans have accepted the anti-democratic and false equivalence of patriotism and the military.

As a candidate, Donald Trump proposed a ban on people from an entire religion. He has not delivered. Instead of decrying a phantom ban on Muslims that never came to pass, his critics should take the win.